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Mercury
Mercury is the first planet in the Sol system that orbits around the star. It revolves around the star at a speedy 88 days. Mercury is tidally locked to the sun, meaning that its rotational speed is such that the same side is presented to the sun for the whole year. As a consequence, the sun-side of Mercury is a boiling 427 degrees Celsius in the middle of the day while at night the temperature can drop to a freezing -173 degrees Celsius. Mercury posesses no atmosphere or magnetic field. it also shows signs of ancient impact craters, which means that geologically, Mercury has been inactive for quite some time. Planetary Description Mercury's planetary structure is something of an anomaly of Sol's terrestrial planets. Mercury's core takes up an estimated 42% of the planet's mass, which is an incredible amount when compared to Earth, where the core only takes up roughly 17% of the planet's mass. Scientists have been unsure of the reason behind this, but theories range from Mercury being impacted in its ancient past, to theories about Mercury actually being the core of an ancient gas giant where the atmosphere blew away. Despite these theories, scientists are willing to take Mercury as it is, a rarity. Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system after the dismissal of Pluto in 2001. It was temporarily pushed to second smallest when in the 2100s a petition to bring Pluto back to the Solar system was accepted. However, in 2210, Pluto was ousted again after a review of the original reason for its dismissal. Mercury became the smallest once more to this day. Mercury has had two major series of bombardments in its 4.6 billion year history. Once was around its formation date when a heavy bombardment period occured around 4.6 billion years ago, and a second at 3.8 billion years ago. The lack of geological activity means that these impact craters are still visible today with newer craters overlapping older ones. Meteorites still impact Mercury's surface, but there have been no major impact events since, newer craters are quite small. Mercury has only a trace atmosphere of gasses that it has been able to capture from the sun. Otherwise, Mercury is a barren rock that is without an atmosphere for anybody to breathe. Even if it was possible for Mercury to have an atmosphere, the temperature extremes would be unbearable. Mercury has no magnetic field, which means that magnetic compasses will not work on the planet. Instead, a 'true north' has been established in order to aid in navigation on the planet's surface. This means that the waypoint at the north and southern pole will never shift like it does on planets like Earth where it naturally moves. Mercury possesses no moon to affect tidal forces. The sun provides more than enough pull to do that itself. Development Mercury originally did not rate very high on on Mankind's colonization list due to the inhospitable environment. That being said, after the initial colonization movement of Mars and the Jovian Moons, economists started to see that Mercury's proxamity to the sun meant that it was possible to set up facilities that would act as giant solar power plants. Following the 2050s, corporations and governments jockeyed to be one of the first to set foot on Mercury to set up power plant colonies. The first colonies were small, but after mining the iron of the planet itself, the colonies grew to be small cities. Solar panels stretched across the ancient lava plains, some of them in clusters as big as a hundred kilometers across. The light reflected from the surface was visible from orbit thanks to the fact that no atmosphere could filter out the light. Today, planetary populations number at 2 million people living in semi-underground cities. Living conditions are decent with cities being connected to Earth for information. Buildings that are on the surface are built to be capable of surviving solar flares and even coronal mass ejections. The solar power plants produce enough power to keep the equipment and life support of the cities active. There is so much power available that the Earth governments buy energy from the corporations that can be used to power Earth. Cities can be powered on a freighter's worth of power cells. Travel is only advised by Mercurian night. Officials believe that it is much better to travel in the cold than an inferno. Crawlers have wide bases that are better adjusted to driving in the low gravity. A wider base also lowers the possibility of flipping. Crawlers are generally owned by wealthy individuals or companies that transport anywhere between a small group to up to thirty men and women. For civilians, massive underground tunnels have been constructed safe from the radiation of the sun and in geological stability for transport between cities. These underground tunnels are ironically called 'highways' which are driven by autonomous vehicles and manned ones as well. In addition to the planetbound power stations, multiple satellite relays gather additional power from the sun whenever the cities are not in a favorable position to harness the electricity powerful sattelites extend mile wide sails that face the sun and gather light from it. Hundreds of these satellites exist around Mercury, but the UEG has discussed putting even more in orbit behind Mercury that will gather energy all year round, beaming the electricity either to Mercury, or to a waystation between the planet and Earth. Most of these stations are unmanned, but some do have small crews. Locations on Mercury There are no governments on Mercury per se. All locations are owned by some form of corporate owned land that is not controlled by any government, but answers to the laws of the Unified Earth Government so as to not become a lawless frontier. The cities of Mercury are named after craters on the planet. *Vyasa City *Vivaldi City *Praxitales City *Chekov City *Sophocles City *Bello City *Shelly City See Also *Muckury Category:Planet